


twisted in the summer mist

by tinydragon (tiny_dragon)



Series: every moon and blinking sun [12]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 07:52:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14468244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_dragon/pseuds/tinydragon
Summary: in which loving each other is hard sometimes but they'll always be ok





	twisted in the summer mist

**Author's Note:**

> IDK MAN relationships are super hard why do we never talk about that and how it's totally cool to argue and have bad times w someone and it doesn't mean u should give up bc u still have a solid thing going (that's what im trying to convey at least)
> 
> aka, i am learning life lessons and subsequently write weird stuff at 1am. nice

 

It’s really nice to love someone.

Loving someone is easy, usually – most of the time. Or at the very least at first. Your feelings sweep you away like the ocean as the tide rolls in. Foam-tipped waves sway on into the sea shore and they carry you with them. And suddenly life is holding hands underneath the dinner table. Love is a doctor’s note. Love is awkward conversations and meeting each other’s parents, slowly learning what kind of food makes each other gag. Love is learning the way someone sleeps.

Nico sleeps sporadically. He wakes up twelve times and there are nightmares that leave him sweat-stained, his body jolting as though he’s had an electric shock beneath the duvet. That leave him rising up in the dark, suddenly awake, palms grazed, breath caught in his throat.

Will? Will sleeps lightly enough to wake up with the slightest movement. He’s always steady and alert. His doctor’s hands are deft. He is not easily startled. He has the kind of half-asleep voice that is perfect for soothing, whether he wants it to or not.

He also talks in his sleep. Mutters the odd word, a half-constructed sentence. He breathes loudly. Nico doesn’t mind. Sometimes, when it’s dark, it’s nice to remember that someone else is there.

Love is good things.

Love is colour. Love is restless nights with someone that you love and not feeling too tired in the morning. Love is singing stupid songs and inside jokes, it is paper hats at Christmas, it’s having somewhere to go when you’re sad, it’s inside jokes, it’s picnics in the summer.

Love is nice. Except for when it isn’t.

Love isn’t always nice. Sometimes loving someone really sucks. Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough. These are the things that Nico is learning. There are quests that pull them apart. Nico has a dad somewhere under the earth who is very demanding and short on godly children to do his bidding (thanks a bunch, Zeus.) Nico has a Big Three record which doesn’t sit well for upcoming prophecies.

Will has an infirmary. Will has younger siblings that clamber for him and cry out in the night. Will has over a dozen kids to patch up every day and that’s when the Stoll brothers _aren_ ’t causing any shenanigans. Will is head counsellor of a cabin. Will has a dad who sucks but hey, he tries – a mom who begins to miss him when he doesn’t come home often enough. Will has a heart bigger than the Athena Parthenos and sometimes, surely, he must get tired of carrying that weight around.

Love isn’t always first dates and birds singing. Nico is a child of Hades and he is used to flowers dropping dead at his feet. Somewhere inside Nico there is a storm cloud of shadows that threaten to break and flood the world in black.

There’s being a demigod.

And there’s being a war veteran.

And there’s being a kid who is all messed up inside.

These are things that take their toll

So sometimes, their love isn’t perfect. It fractures and it breaks. Bones burst out of their sockets and everything hurts a whole lot for a while. Sometimes it feels like it will never stop hurting. Sometimes they fight and they barely talk for days after. Not even out of anger – but because they’ll argue at night, and Nico falls asleep by 5am at which point Will rises with the sun.

Nico is called away to play with skeleton bones and try his step-grandmother’s cooking (Demeter has taken quite the shine to vegan recipe books). Will, meanwhile, patches people up, covers torn skin with plasters, bandages fractures, spoons helpings of ambrosia into mouths that won’t move on their own.

Sometimes love is out of sync. The waves roll right back into the ocean, and they leave miles and miles of wasteland, dead sand. Two boys sit far apart and wait for the water to break again.

There are arguments and things you don’t mean to say. There are silences riddled with words that you want to say but don’t feel ready to. There is an ocean of things you would say if you knew what you were feeling.

Love is rough all the time, Nico thinks, but it’s probably the most rough when you’re sixteen, and it’s overwhelming and it feels like the end of the world and, hey, given the reputation of Greek tragedies, it just might be.

So it’s really nice to love someone. But loving someone isn’t always nice.

He’d say that to Will, but he doesn’t know quite how. So they sit there, in this inky silence. Outside of the cabin walls the harpies screech. Tomorrow, Nico might be called away for another quest, or maybe Will won’t be able to talk to him for three days because he’s so busy with shifts and younger siblings.

They might have all the time in the world together but nothing to say. Their words might clash. Sometimes you love someone and yet everything they say makes you want to grind your teeth together in frustration. Say: shut up! Shut up, please, just stop fucking talking.

At first, that scared Nico. He thought that maybe he’d figured this out all wrong. That he didn’t love this guy at all, or at least, not in the way that he thought he did. But he doesn’t feel this way anymore. It has been a bad week. It’s been a bad couple of days. They have been fighting. They have not kissed nearly enough.

But here is Will. A gentle weight across his bedspread. A thin-boned hand that reaches out and takes his own. A heart that beats. A kid that sleep talks and murmurs the most stupid shit imaginable.

“I’m sorry things have been bad,” Will whispers.

A gentle hand squeeze. The waves roll in.

“Loving people’s hard sometimes, huh?”

Nico nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Hard. But – good, I guess, I think.”

Will smiles. It’s watery. The waves wash away the debris from the storm before. Nico drops his head and leans against Will’s shoulder, and feels the ends of the blonde curls tickling the side of his cheek.

“You think?”

“Fine, I know.”

“Know what?”

“Fishing for compliments, are we?”

Their banter is light, tentative. Fighting doesn’t need to be this big, explosive thing. Sometimes it is gentle digs and angry words. Sometimes more and sometimes less. Sometimes it is tired. But it’s only sometimes.

“Always,” Will says.

Nico laughs.

“I know it’s worth it,” he says. “Cause I love you.”

Will’s lips curve. “Nice. I love you too.”

He kisses the side of Nico’s head. It feels gentler than a rain droplet, than a flower petal drifting slowly to the ground. Nico closes his eyes.

“We’ll get through this, right?” he asks, quietly. Just to be sure.

“Course,” Will says. They have fallen against each other. It’s late and they are sleepy. Loving someone is tiring, and they should probably take a nap. “We’ll always get through it.”

And they will. Loving someone is hard, and it can hurt. But with the right person it heals, too.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: willandlyra
> 
> ive FINALLY finished my dissertation so send me prompts and i actually might write them before the year 2045


End file.
